I have a GPA 3.4 before the summer course and ended up failed calculus based physics 2… I am going to retake it at my new college (transferred from community college to university) and aim for an A to make up for it. My GPA resets at my new college, but I’m wondering what Grad school admissions will think of the failed physics course. I have an internship in a Biochem lab (I’m majoring in Biochemistry) and also work part time in fast food. I’m going to be an intern at the lab year round until I graduate with my bachelors (~2.5 years) and clearly will try to get my GPA up before applying. Am I in good standing or with admissions see the F in the summer and toss my application aside? I’m planning on applying to Binghamton University’s biological sciences PhD program so it’s not a top school… so maybe I will be ok?
The PhD program I’m looking at has a 3.0 cutoff and I know I can get 3 good letters of recommendation from past professors and coworkers/supervisor at my internship. I figured I could discuss my workload outside of the physics course in my cover letter as to why I failed it bc I am working 50+ hours a week between my internship and fast food job.
You might be OK if you can get a good grade in a similar course when you take it the next time. I encourage you to have better judgment in the future - summer courses move quickly and presumably you had some indication at the time that you were expected to allocate a number of hours a day for study.
Thanks and yes I studied almost everyday for the course but the lectures were horrible. The professor didn’t seem to know the material very well and pop quizzes and tests were confusing as they weren’t like homework problems or in class examples, and the wording was weird. there wasn’t much prep for the test and I wasn’t the only one confused by the test material. I plan to retake the same equivalent course at the university, it’s still Calc based physics 2, but hopefully with a professor that knows how to teach and doesn’t have the students correcting his lecture every lecture. Or erasing an example problem because he couldn’t figure it out (yes that happened more than once throughout the course).